A combative coach is sacked
He had always been an outsize figure on autumn afternoons, fiercely aggressive, his chin thrust forward in defiance. He wanted to win. He wanted to win, in the end, more than anything, and it was the flaw that ruined him. The denouement came on a Friday night in a meaningless bowl game. Coach Wayne Woodrow Hayes, 65, the autocrat of Ohio State football for 28 years, was fired after assaulting an opposing player. Sadly, the incident that ended his remarkable career in disgrace surprised virtually no one who was familiar with Woody. "Hayes had become a caricature of himself," said Max Brown, editor of the Columbus Monthly in the home city of Ohio State. "He was deteriorating in front of everyone's eyes. What happened was inevitable."
Violent outbursts were a hallmark of his coaching career. "Woody's idea of sublimating," an acquaintance once said, "is to hit someone." In 1956, following an Ohio State loss to Iowa, Hayes manhandled a Cedar Rapids television cameraman. Three years later, after losing to Southern California, he took swipes at a Los Angeles sportswriter and a bystander. While Michigan was beating his boys in 1971, Hayes menaced an official, then broke a sideline marker over his knee. Before the 1973 Rose Bowl, he pushed a camera into the face of a newspaper photographer. "That'll take care of you, you son of a bitch," the coach was quoted as saying. In 1977 the Big Ten put him on one year's probation after he slugged an ABC cameraman.
Anyone else would have been dismissed long ago, but at Ohio State, where the game is a religion and a $6 million annual business, Woody Hayes continued to be backed by the administration. Critics with the temerity to question the university's sense of values in keeping on a man with such a temper were shouted down by the legions of his supporters. Some proudly wore scarlet and gray O.S.U. T shirts proclaiming: WOODY'S UNIVERSITY.
The people closest to him never seemed to lose patience. "Divorce, no," quipped his wife Anne, when asked if she ever considered leaving him. "Murder, yes." Hayes certainly was not volunteering to retire. "When I do, I'll die on the 50-yard line at Ohio Stadium in front of the usual crowd of 87,000," he said a few years ago. "If you do," someone interjected, "I sure hope the score's in your favor." Replied Hayes: "If it isn't, I won't."
To Woody Hayes, life, like oldtime football, was three yards and a cloud of dust. "I may not be able to outsmart too many people, but I can outwork 'em," he frequently said, and he was right. But whatever his intellectual insecurities, Hayes was confident that he was receiving life's message loud and clear. Rectitude, he was certain, lay in Midwestern values, rock-ribbed Republicanism and college football. Just as surely, permissiveness led to social cataclysm, liberalism to national weakness. He built his personal philosophy on the lessons of war and football, and he saw numerous parallels between the two. His heroes were Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson and, naturally, General George Patton. "This whole country," the coach liked to say, "has been built on one thing—winning."